Houston Rockets Center Dwight Howard Keeps Snakes

April 22, 2015

NBA basketball player Dwight Howard apparently loves snakes so much that he has about 20 pet snakes, including a Boa constrictor that had babies. The mainstream sports media calls him crazy, but for us it is just a normal thing, except of course Howard’s $70,000 fish and snake tank that graces the entrance of his Houston home.

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Bleacher Report has a full writeup on the Houston Rockets star and devotes 12 paragraphs on his snakes and the other animals that can be found in his Houston home. His red-tailed Boa constrictor, named Micky after Micky Mouse, is 10 feet long and five years old while Minnie, another boa he keeps is six feet long and four years old. The report says that Howard loves his snakes like they are his own children.

"Minnie has this pretty face and these pretty eyes," he told Bleacher Report. "And now they have these beautiful babies. They're just all bunched up right now like they love each other [he smiles and hugs himself]. It's so cool to see. I even had a baby monitor for Minnie [when she was pregnant]. You had to watch everything that she did."

In addition to the entrance of Howard’s house, he keeps three snake enclosures in his bedroom, two for Minnie and Micky and a third for George, a yellow reticulated python. Of the 17 babies that Minnie had, he is going to keep just three of them. The rest will go to other snake lovers.

According to the report, Howard has had an affinity for animals since he was a child. He has even owned a sugar glider and wants a prairie dog. And he wants to partner with the Black Jaguar White Tiger Foundation in an effort to help care for endangered tigers, jaguars and other animals in Atlanta, Houston, and Orlando.

John B. Virata keeps a western hognose snake, a ball python, two corn snakes, a king snake, and two leopard geckos. His first snake, a California kingsnake, was purchased at the Pet Place in Westminster, CA for $5. His first pet reptile was a green anole that arrived in a small box via mail order. Follow him on Twitter @johnvirata